“Yeah,” Trey says. She wants to say that the real difference is that they have no right or need to know about the Cunniffes’ step, while she has both a right and a need to know about Brendan, but fatigue has suddenly hit her like a rock to the head. She loves Lena’s kitchen, which is worn and the right kind of messy and full of warm colors. She wants to lie down on the floor and go to sleep.
She has a third choice. She could walk away from all of this. Go up the mountain, and stay there till this all blows over: live in her abandoned cottage, or go to one of the mountainy men. They’re not talkers; they wouldn’t ask questions, and they wouldn’t rat her out, no matter who came looking. They’re not scared of the likes of Rushborough.
Lena is looking at her steadily. “What brought this on?” she inquires.
Trey looks blank.
“How come you’re asking me tonight, two years on?”
Trey didn’t expect this. Lena is the least nosy person she knows, which is among the reasons Trey likes her. “Dunno,” she says.
“Feckin’ teenagers,” Lena says. She gets up from the floor and goes to let the dogs in. They skid over to check out Banjo and sniff his paw. “Did that fella have his dinner yet?”
“Nah,” Trey says.
Lena finds an extra bowl and takes a bag of dog food from a cupboard. All three dogs forget about Banjo’s paw and close in on her, writhing around her legs and giving her the full blast of desperate beagle starvation.
“When I was sixteen,” she says, “one of my mates got pregnant. She didn’t want her parents knowing. So d’you know what I did? I kept my mouth shut.”
Trey nods in agreement.
“I was a feckin’ eejit,” Lena says. She nudges dogs out of the way with her knee so she can pour out their food. “Your woman needed a doctor keeping an eye on her; there coulda been something wrong. But all I thought was, adults would make a big fuss about it, make it all complicated. Simpler to leave them outa it, and handle it ourselves.”
“What happened?”
“One of our other mates had better sense. She told her mam. Your woman got to see a doctor, she had the baby, everything was grand. But she coulda ended up having it in a field and the pair of them dying. All because we reckoned adults were more hassle than they were worth.”
Trey knows what Lena is getting at, but it seems to her that, like with the Cunniffes’ step, Lena is overlooking differences that matter. She feels lonelier than ever. She almost wishes she hadn’t come to Lena’s, seeing as Banjo is grand anyway. “Who was it?” she asks.
“Feck’s sake,” Lena says. “That’s not the point.”
Trey picks herself up off the floor. “Can you keep him tonight?” she says. “I’ll come get him in the morning.”
Lena puts the dog food bag back in its cupboard. “Listen to me, you,” she says. “Me and Cal, we’d do anything for you. You know that, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Trey says, acutely embarrassed, staring at the dogs eating. “Thanks.” The idea does give her a kind of comfort, but a confusing, messy kind. It would be more solid if she could find something that she wanted them to do.
“Then remember it. And you need to wash your face and put something over that T-shirt, unless you want people asking what kinda wars you’ve been in.”
—
The mountain is busier on the way home, a busyness that keeps itself on the edge of perception, crowded with movements and rustles that might or might not be there. Its night activities are in full swing. Trey feels bare, without Banjo at her heel.
She’s not worried for Lena. If her dad tries convincing Lena to put money into Rushborough’s imaginary gold mine, he’ll be wasting his time. What Trey is worried about is Cal. He’s doing something, she can’t tell what, and he doesn’t know what Rushborough is. Cal has sustained enough damage through getting mixed up with her and hers. The whole of her mind balks at the thought of him taking any more. The fact that she’s pissed off with him only intensifies this: right now, in particular, she has no wish to be deeper in his debt than she already is.
She’ll find something to do about Cal. Somewhere along the way, her decision has clarified itself. Her dad and Rushborough are the only weapons she has, or is ever likely to get, against this townland. They’re locked and loaded, ready to her hand. She didn’t go looking for them; something laid them in front of her, the same something that brought Cal to Ardnakelty when she needed to find out what had happened to Brendan. She was scared to talk to Cal, then. She did it anyway because she could feel, the same way she can feel now, that walking away would be spitting in the face of that something.
Cal told her a long time back that everyone needs a code to live by. Trey only partway understood what he meant, but in spite of or because of that, she thought about it a lot. Her code has always been a rudimentary, inchoate thing, but since her dad came back, it’s been coalescing and sharpening, pointing ways and forming demands of its own. If she can’t kill anyone for what they did to Brendan, or even send them to prison, she needs a blood price.
Ten
Occasionally Lena has mild second thoughts about not having children, mainly when the even predictability of her life starts to chafe at her, but today she’s thanking God for it. Trey isn’t even hers, and she still has Lena’s head melted.
Something is happening in Trey’s world. Lena assumes it was Johnny who hit her and hurt Banjo, but from the way Trey was talking, it wasn’t just a drunk tantrum; it had something to do with Brendan. Lena has gathered the gist of what happened to Brendan, though she’s been careful not to know the details, but she can’t make any of it connect up with Johnny or his Englishman or their gold. She was almost hoping Banjo’s paw would get worse overnight, so she would have the drive to the vet’s and back to take another shot at talking to Trey, but by this morning the swelling had gone down and he could put weight on the paw, although he still felt he deserved extra fuss and food as compensation for the experience. Trey showed up before Lena left for work and took him away, with barely a word beyond a careful thank-you speech that she’d obviously been practicing. Lena had no idea what to do about her.
This is a skill she’s never learned. She loves her nieces and nephews, she’s played with them and listened to their troubles and given the odd opinion if they asked for one, but any tricky bits of handling they require fall on their mothers, or occasionally their fathers. Probably she could have done more if she had chosen to, but she never did. It never seemed necessary: their parents had things well in hand. Whatever things are going on in Trey’s life, no one has them in hand.
Lena is, at last, unsettled. Trey put the capper on it, but it’s not just Trey. It’s Cal, electric with edginess, anger smoking under his calm; and it’s Rushborough, who stopped her to make small talk about scenery when she was out walking the dogs, and whom she liked even less than she expected to. Waiting and watching aren’t enough any more. She bit her tongue and rang Noreen to make amends for their spat the other day, but Noreen, while her fund of conjecture and rumor is considerably more impressive than Lena’s, had nothing solid either. So, against most of her own instincts, Lena is headed to the one place where she might get a hint as to what the fuck is going on. She’s fairly sure that this is a bad idea, but she hasn’t got a better one.
The heat has thickened. The early-afternoon sun grips the village into immobility; the main street is empty, only the old men sitting slumped on the grotto wall, too hot to move indoors, one of them fanning himself with sluggish flaps of his newspaper.